Artificial intelligence to assess body composition on routine abdominal CT scans and predict mortality in pancreatic...

Body composition is associated with mortality; however its routine assessment is too time-consuming.

To demonstrate the value of artificial intelligence (AI) to extract body composition measures from routine studies, we aimed to develop a fully automated AI approach to measure fat and muscles masses, to validate its clinical discriminatory value, and to provide the code, training data and workflow solutions to facilitate its integration into local practice.

We developed a neural network that quantified the tissue components at the L3 vertebral body level using data from the Liver Tumor Challenge (LiTS) and a pancreatic cancer cohort. We classified sarcopenia using accepted skeletal muscle index cut-offs and visceral fat based its median value. We used Kaplan Meier curves and Cox regression analysis to assess the association between these measures and mortality.

Applying the algorithm trained on LiTS data to the local cohort yielded good agreement [>0.8 intraclass correlation (ICC)]; when trained on both datasets, it had excellent agreement (>0.9 ICC). The pancreatic cancer cohort had 136 patients (mean age: 67 ± 11 years; 54% women); 15% had sarcopenia; mean visceral fat was 142 cm². Concurrent with prior research, we found a significant association between sarcopenia and mortality [mean survival of 15 ± 12 vs. 22 ± 12 (p < 0.05), adjusted HR of 1.58 (95% CI: 1.03-3.33)] but no association between visceral fat and mortality. The detector analysis took 1 ± 0.5 s.

AI body composition analysis can provide meaningful imaging biomarkers from routine exams demonstrating AI's ability to further enhance the clinical value of radiology reports.